Speaking with IGN, Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser discussed how the company approaches crunch time for game development which has sadly become quite a concerning topic in the games industry for the past few months. In the interview, Bowser stated that the company takes a different approach and believes in giving their creative teams the breathing room they need and not just crunch them to meet a set deadline.

Bowser stated:

“The crunch point is an interesting one. For us, one of our key tenants is that we bring smiles to people’s faces, and we talk about that all the time. It’s our vision. Or our mission, I should say. For us, that applies to our own employees. We need to make sure that our employees have good work-life balance.”

“One of those examples is, we will not bring a game to market before it’s ready. We just talked about one example [in Animal Crossing’s delay]. It’s really important that we have that balance in our world. It’s actually something we’re proud of.”